Veterans Of Korea's `Forgotten War' Claim A Quiet Victory Today -- 3-Year Conflict Cost 54,246 U.S. Lives But `Drew The Line' Against Communists

Forty-three years ago this week, a war began that profoundly changed America, then was relegated to little-read history books.

Though few other Americans recall it now, the men who fought the Korean War are proud to think that it was the beginning of the end for communism.

"We call it the war America forgot to remember," Win Scott, 63, of Waynesville, N.C., said just before joining a group of fellow veterans who are returning to the battlefields of their youth to mark the anniversary as guests of the Republic of Korea.

In 1950, Scott was a 20-year-old Marine serving with the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. Five years earlier, when World War II ended, Soviet troops had accepted the Japanese surrender in the northern half of the Korean peninsula while U.S. forces did the same in the southern half. The division of Korea, intended to be temporary, had hardened into an Iron Curtain of the Far East, separating a communist regime in the North from one sponsored by the United States in the South.

On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army poured across the boundary, intending to reunify the country by force under the communist flag.

The communists might have achieved that objective, for the outgunned South Koreans were overwhelmed and soon in disorderly retreat. But four days after the attack, President Harry S Truman announced that U.S. troops, Scott and his Marine Corps buddies among them, would go to the defense of South Korea.

"We've got to stop the sons-of-bitches no matter what," Truman said, explaining his decision with customary bluntness to Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

The first Americans sent to Korea, high on memories of their regiments' World War II victories, predicted a quick and easy campaign. Frank Torries, then a young Marine fresh out of Spanish Harlem, heard a reporter from The New York Times asking the disembarking GIs if any were from New York.

"I am," Torries told the reporter. "The Marines have landed. We're going to kick ass and be out of here in three weeks."

In fact, the three weeks stretched into three years, during which 54,246 Americans died, almost as many as were killed in the 10 years of the Vietnam War.

The overall toll was far greater: 1.3 million South Koreans, many of them civilians; a million Chinese; 500,000 North Koreans.

It was a war both sides grossly miscalculated. The communists, having won control of China the previous year, assumed the United States wouldn't fight again in Asia so soon after World War II.

Based upon U.S. foreign policy at the time, that wasn't a bad bet. Though an ally of the United States, South Korea had been denied adequate weapons, even though the Chinese communists obviously were arming North Korea.

In 1950, the United States was still trying to figure out its new role as the world's policeman. A generation earlier, America had retreated into its traditional isolationism after its victories in World War I.

Immediately after World War II, the United States was of two minds: It declared that in Europe it would not permit any advance by the Soviet Union beyond its Eastern European satellite states, but there was no such commitment in Asia.

When Truman acted, a lot of Americans had to adjust their personal lives as well as their political assumptions.

Fritz Heistermann of Whittier, Calif., had enlisted in the Marines at age 16 and served in World War II at the battles of Guam and Iwo Jima.

Like thousands of ex-GIs, Heistermann was recalled to service when the Korean War broke out. By Christmas 1950, he and other Americans had advanced to the Chosin Reservoir in far northern Korea. China, which had entered the war a month earlier, suddenly poured in wave after wave of soldiers.

"Chosin was much worse than Iwo Jima, because of the bitter weather and being outnumbered," said Heistermann.

Frustrated by the Chinese move, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. commander, wanted to drop atomic bombs on their bases and supply lines. But Truman rejected that idea just as forcefully as he had decided not to abandon South Korea.

His decision was momentous for the world: Never after that did any of the superpowers use their atomic arsenals. But it also meant the Korean conflict stalemated into a war of attrition.

Four decades later, Korea remains divided. But Torries, now 63 and living in Santa Ana, Calif., believes this was the war in which America drew the line against further communist advances.

When communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union started falling in 1989, Torries and his fellow Korean War vets were pleased to think that the process had begun with those bloody battles of 1950, where so many of their own buddies had fallen.

Yet that is a history lesson their fellow Americans have refused to learn, Heistermann said.

"When I came home from World War II, there were bands playing at the dock," he said. "When I came home from Korea, your family welcomed you, and that was it. I never talked about that war. People weren't interested and wouldn't know where it was even if you told them."